Ummm..."online catalog of more than 30,000 songs"??? That would be embarrasing if it were true. As a satisfied multi-year Zune pass subscriber, I have to say that figure has to be closer to something like 20 million songs. Almost everything my family and I have looked for is in the collection. Mostly it looks like a rebranding of the Zune Pass along with the addition of advertiser-based free streaming.

I would not look for an iPod like device, that was the Zune player. Now the players will be the Windows Phones (it's already in the Windows Phone 7 devices), and Windows 8 tablets and PCs.

I wonder if this means that Redmond has plans for a device similar to an iPod in order to fully compete with Apple in their markets now that the Zune is dead.

This sounds like a great service, but if Microsoft decides to lock it into their platforms only, they may wake up in a few years and realize that it failed, just like the Zune.

As far as uploading all of your music to the Microsoft cloud goes - there has to be some sort of limitation to that, I would imagine... some acquaintances of mine have terabyte upon terabyte of music / content that would fall under this service.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.